You may have a gizmo or two in your washing machine, several thingamajigs in your car, and a few gadgets or a widget in your dishwasher. It wouldn’t be surprising if the appliances in your home also contained some thingies and thingamabobs. They’re all nondescript terms for mechanical parts, or freestanding mechanical items.

The use of the word gizmo, which can also be spelled gismo, is recent. During World War II, the US Navy began using the term, and sailors returning from the war quickly turned the word into common usage. Recorded writings that include the word gizmo don’t appear until the mid-40s and early 50s.

Essentially, the gizmo was just a working mechanical part. Since mechanized equipment contained so many parts, the name might escape a person for a moment, who could say “Well it looks like that gizmo isn’t working properly.” It’s almost a fill word for lapse in memory, though soon gizmo simply applied to any running mechanical piece.

World War II was also a time when pilots, soldiers, and sailors might have lightly referred to mechanical failures as caused by gremlins. In cartoons of this era, gremlins were often depicted as removing a gizmo or two from various moving vehicles. In tribute to the concept of gremlins, Spielberg created the film Gremlins, featuring a creature called a mogwai, named Gizmo, who was actually quite sweet unless you got him wet or fed him after midnight.

A gizmo can also be an object that doesn’t work in coordination with other parts. It may be an inventive or clever toy or a small feat of engineering. Technically a cell phone is a gizmo, as would be a mini remote control racecar, an electronic bubble blower, and the Magic Bullet™ Blender. In fact virtually all infomercial electronic devices would fall under the heading of gizmo.

Gizmo can express that something is kind of neat, or fascinating. It applies to a huge range of products. Just about anything battery or solar powered and handheld could be a gizmo. Of course such things could also be thingies, gadgets or others. What word you use depends upon what word your mind hits upon first. More often, the gizmo is the nondescript working part of machinery you don’t understand. And while you may not understand these parts, your world is full of them.